A volunteer near Crandon has found a patch of ultra-rare plants that a botanist thought might have gone away in Wisconsin.
Kevin Doyle of the DNR's Bureau of Natural Heritage Conservation works with the rare plant monitoring program. They use volunteers extensively to comb the land and woods looking for plants that are threatened. Doyle says a volunteer found a new population of the threatened calypso orchid near Crandon.
He says this was significant because the species has been declining across the state and he thought it had disappeared completely. Doyle looked for it in Forest and Florence counties and thought it was gone. But a volunteer found some near Crandon...
"This is a population we didn't know about but this volunteer was familiar with. She had seen it last year. They went out and looked for it, couldn't find it, and then on their way out they stumbled upon four plants, three in flower..."
Doyle says as the climate warms, the plant will be retreating north. He says they have some options now that the plant has been found again, including storing seeds or seeing if it will grow elsewhere. Doyle says citizen scientists are making a big difference...
"It's an example of the great success story and collaboration with all the people who are going out to look for this stuff on their own time...."
Doyle reports other success stories and some apparent losses with other plants disappearing. We have a link here to the DNR's rare plants program. We have a longer interview about the Crandon orchid find below.
